LUO Jia,WANG Han,XU Xiaohua.Comparison of ionospheric characteristic parameters retrieved from FY-3C and COSMIC radio occultation during 2014 to 2016[J].Journal of National University of Defense Technology,2018,40(4):181-186[点击复制]

The ionospheric EDPs (electron density profiles) obtained during 2014 to 2016 from two GNSS(global navigation satellite system) RO (radio occultation) missions, the FY-3C mission and the COSMIC mission, were used to compare the ionospheric peak density NmF2 and the ionospheric peak height hmF2 of two missions under the collocation criterion with the time window of 7.5 min and the space window of 2.5°. The results show that the peak parameters derived from the two RO missions are highly correlated, with the yearly average correlation coefficient of NmF2 and hmF2 being 0.87 and 0.75, respectively. The biases of the peak parameters derived from the two RO missions are very small, with the absolute and the relative bias of NmF2 and hmF2 being less than ±0.25×105 el/cm3and ±15.0%, and ±7.00 km and ±1.80%, respectively. In addition, the strip shaped spatial distributions of the two ionospheric characteristic parameters from both of the two RO missions show that the values of NmF2 and hmF2 are larger in the areas of the equator and low latitudes than in other regions, and that the values of NmF2 and hmF2 decline significantly in 2016 compared with 2014 and 2015. 